Recently I was asked to serve on the advisory board for the upcoming book The Entitlement Trap by New York Times bestselling authors Richard and Linda Eyre.
The book will be available on September 6th, but you can pre-order a copy at a 33% discount on their website by clicking here (You will pay $12 instead of $18.) or you can pre-order on Amazon.com, where the Kindle addition is available.
I’m excited that a new book is being published addressing the issue of entitlement in children because as a former private school attendee, and especially as a teacher specializing in gifted students in an upscale area, it is something I have seen frequently: spoiled kids who believe they have the God-given right to have whatever they want, regardless of the consequences.
I try very hard as a parent to get my children to accept the word “no” because it’s an important life skill they will need as an adult. No, I’m not going to buy that if I would have to put it on a credit card. No, I’m not going to eat a second piece of cake even though I want it. No, I’m not going to take out a home loan that big even if the bank says I can afford it. (We all know where that one gets us.)
It’s easy for parents to fall into the trap of trying to “keep up with the Joneses.”
I had second graders whose cell phones would go off during class and a former employer of mine had three children, drove two brand new BMW’s but was worried about his house going under foreclosure and had to close his business. Parents of children who were not even in the gifted program would come to meetings to give their peers the false impression that their children were in the gifted classes, and one family even wrote into a local magazine complaining about my class (their daughter wasn’t gifted and I never even met her, let alone taught her) just to get their picture & false story published because having a child in the gifted program was a huge status symbol in our community. When children didn’t pass the tests the school gave, parents paid hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for private psychologists to issue the tests to their children, repeatedly, until they passed, never mind that Florida was in the middle of a horrific housing crisis and many of their home were under foreclosure or short sale.
Priorities, people.
The Entitlement Trap is about having them and how to set them for ourselves and for our children.
Of course, the examples I gave were pretty extreme. It can be something as simple as always offering to buy a candy bar or a small toy as a way to keep the kids quiet and well-behaved in the store. In a surprisingly short amount of time they come to expect it and the one time you decide not to buy it, you will be met with temper tantrums & tears.
This book is about setting ourselves up for success rather than failure.
I believe it’s always easier to do the right thing in the first place, and we have a responsibility to do right by our children.
You can visit the website here for more information.
**I will be compensated via a review copy of the book before it’s publication date, but all opions in this post are 100% mine.**
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